For the Appalling Stories series, entertainment is paramount. Yes, we intend to push back against left-wing agitprop infesting genre fiction, but if it’s a boring story, or, worse yet, right-wing agitprop masquerading as genre fiction, it wouldn’t fit. For my story Deprogram in Appalling Stories 2, I wanted to extend the craziness of multiple genders and the criminalizing of traditional morals to the next level, positing a future that hinted of Dystopia without bludgeoning the reader with details. Here’s an excerpt:

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After a final glance at the security monitor, Grayson got up from his desk, left his office, and waited in the reception area for his new clients. They hadn’t signed the contract, but he knew with perfect certitude that by the end of the meeting they would leave his office scared, hopeful, and lighter by $250,000. They always did.

Smoothing his necktie, Grayson played his favorite pre-meeting game: which spouse would open the door first? Definitely Evelyn. Pat was still transitioning, and the male-to-female types tended to go overboard with the wilting flower routine until they worked out the hormonal quirks and relational friction. If he was wrong, he’d do leg day twice this week. If he was right, he’d treat himself to an extra shot of—

The door opened and Evelyn walked in, followed by her wife. Both medium-sized, average-looking types; the security monitor’s shitty resolution hadn’t picked up the lipstick on Pat’s teeth or Evelyn’s puffy eyes.

“Good morning,” Grayson said with a relieved smile, keeping his hands where they could see them. “I checked each of your ProReg profiles ten minutes ago. I take it you both still prefer to be referred to as Ms. for the purposes of this meeting? I apologize if I’ve made an offensive assumption.”

“Ms. Papasian-Smith,” Pat said. She clutched her Nouveau Spade purse in a tight grip, but he noticed that her right hand twitched on meeting him: suppressing the handshake habit she’d acquired in decades of being—no, living as a man.

Keeping his expression bland, Grayson bobbed his head. “A pleasure. Please, call me Grayson or Mr. Dahab. Or even ‘hey, you’; whatever suits.” He didn’t wait to see their reaction to the weak joke as he led the way to his office. “Please have a seat. Would either of you like coffee or water?”

Nodding at their demurrals, he seated himself behind the desk and steepled his fingers. “We need to get something out of the way: there won’t be any monitors or recordings during this meeting, due to the…sensitive nature of what we’re about to discuss. With that in mind, I understand that you’re putting yourselves in some danger by consenting to being alone with me. I was born and continue to identify as male and cis, as you’ve no doubt seen from my ProReg profile. If that makes you feel unsafe, we can stop the meeting right now and you’re free to leave with no hard feelings. Is that all right?”

Evelyn looked at Pat, who made a show of thinking about it before nodding. “Yes. That’ll be fine.”

“Good,” Grayson said, folding his hands. “I got the broa—er, the less-detailed story in your email. Can you tell me a little more so we can decide what our next steps might be?”

As Evelyn opened her mouth to speak, Pat leaned forward and barked, “What’s your success rate? How can we be sure we’ll…I mean, our daughter, she…” Her mouth pursed into a glistening red asshole shape, and as she reached into her purse for a Kleenex, sobbing, Evelyn grimaced and patted at her shoulder.

Grayson turned, opened the mini-fridge, and pulled out a bottle of water, which he placed on the desk within both women’s reach. “I understand how difficult this can be,” he said, once Pat’s storm of crying had blown over. “However, I should probably warn you that what you—what we’re dealing with is extremely dangerous. These terrorists…these…cultists, they’ve mastered the art of brainwashing. I can’t deprogram someone with a snap of my fingers. It’s a long and difficult process, and at the end, sometimes I don’t succeed.”

Evelyn’s head snapped up. “What happens then?”

“I call the police, who’ll take her away.”

“Oh, Gaia,” Pat sobbed, and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.

Blinking, Evelyn said, “But we wouldn’t tell—“

“I can’t take that chance,” Grayson said, lifting his hand. “If your daughter’s really caught up in this, and from what you told me in the email I’m sure she is, then she’s joined an organization that bombs hospitals, shoots schools, and burns down shopping malls. The WLA makes the freedom fighter 9/11 terrorists look like Outdoor Scouts selling cookies. We could all be sent away for the rest of our lives if we’re caught aiding and abetting even one of these WLA types. Or worse.” He tapped his index finger against his forehead.

Evelyn covered her mouth and looked away.

Voice soft, he added, “But Ms. Papasian-Smith asked a good question. My deprogramming success rate. It currently stands at ninety percent. Nine out of every ten kids. That’s good odds. And I can guarantee that there’s nothing I won’t do to save your daughter from these monsters.”

Glancing at her wife, who shredded a damp tissue and stared into her lap, Evelyn said, “Okay. What do you need to know?”

For Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Stories of Social Injustice, the book’s subtitle preceded the content. I chose to interpret it this way: my contributions needed to be more appalling in this second volume. I wanted to push the envelope without devolving into a tiresome description of disgusting circumstances, which is typical in so-called “extreme horror” stories. Appalling Stories 2 isn’t extreme horror, though many of the events described therein are pretty horrible.

People like to ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” I never know how to answer this question. Even my dental hygienist asked me once. I replied, “In the dentist chair,” which elicited the hoped-for laugh. A novel has to have more than one idea. You can get away with just one in a short story.

For the story Her Bodies, Her Choice, I didn’t come up with the idea myself. Rick Canton, a friend of mine who I used to work with on the website The Loftus Party provided the central concept. On Twitter he asked a prominent feminist, “Why’re you so excited for abortion? Do you eat aborted babies or something?” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the idea. He’s since been kicked off of Twitter for similar offenses. But his question planted the seed: feminists eating fetuses. Disgusting. Horrifying. Compelling. But I had to flesh it out. It had to make sense, it had to entertain, and it had to fit within the theme of the Appalling Stories anthology. The story I eventually came up with takes this idea and runs with it, turning it into a dreadful, far-reaching conspiracy. It even includes a description of a photo I saw in a book on witchcraft decades ago: a woman’s skeleton, freshly disinterred, with huge, heavy screws at her knees and elbows. They’d screwed her bones together to keep her from rising from the grave. That’s how much they feared her, even in death.

My other story, The Deprogram, came as a result of watching the 1982 movie Split Image, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. In it, a young man enters a Bhagwan-style cult and his desperate parents try to get him out. The same author who gave me the idea for the Bake Me a Cake story in the first Appalling Stories anthology suggested I watch it, though I can’t remember the context. The movie wasn’t bad, everyone played to type, and it provided fertile ground for a story: in a social justice future, people would have to be brainwashed to accept ludicrous notions like gender being a social construct instead of a biological fact of nature. Political correctness not just run amok, but extended into its necessarily oppressive and unpleasant future, where certain ideas are criminalized and rebelling against the accepted mode of thinking is punishable by government-issued lobotomy. But it had to be realistic. Like the previous story, it had to make sense and fit the theme.

You, the reader, will have to decide if either story was appalling enough, or even more appalling than the previous volume. And I’m not talking about the writing.

In Appalling Stories 2, we sent out a call to writers to produce stories appropriate to the theme, and were amazed at the number of submissions. After a lengthy and occasionally blistering winnowing process, we settled on the ten best stories for this volume. From hilarious cautionary tales to science fiction yarns, from searing satire to supernatural horror, it’s a smorgasbord of fiction that represents the new counterculture, not the focus-grouped, watered-down PC trash that’s infested the literary market.

With a foreword from Christian Toto, editor of HollywoodInToto.com, Appalling Stories 2 is the perfect antidote to today’s aggressively woke times. Check out the book that Daniel Greenfield of Sultan Knish called, “A grim, hilarious and no-holds-barred dive into the terrible social justice future and its even more terrible present!”

Obsidian Point is proud to reveal the cover to the new counterculture short fiction anthology Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice.

From the back cover:

The virulent disease of political correctness has infected the body politic from nose to toes, and even the field of literature isn’t immune. The best way to inoculate yourself against this Social Justice Warrior-carried malady is to read entertaining, old-school fiction that neither pulls punches nor takes prisoners.

That’s where Appalling Stories 2 comes in. The spiritual sequel to the top-selling anthology Appalling Stories, this new collection brings you ripped-from-the-headlines tales of short fiction written to make you laugh, make you cry, and even make you think. Just a little.

In these pages you’ll read stories of humanity’s terrifying First Contact with extraterrestrial life, the horrifying secret behind today’s radical feminist movement, what happens when the wokest man you know discards the last of his White Privilege, and more. From a far-future history of America’s decline to disturbing tales of gun control gone wild, you’re sure to find something that will stick with you long after you’ve closed the book.

And the best part is that you’ll be making an SJW so mad when you tell him/her/zir what you’re reading.

My notes are written on legal pads and spiral notebooks. I did everything offline. I’ll let you know where I hid the original copies at the end of this video, but don’t just click to the end, okay? Watch the whole thing first. Do this for me. I know you hate me and think I’m a bitch and I don’t blame you, but please. Please. I can’t trust my parents. They’re probably part of this.

It sounds crazy and over-dramatic like…like in a movie, but the only reason you’re watching this is because I’m dead. It means they got me. My former friends and colleagues. If you’d seen my phone…I had writers from The Atlantic to The New York Times who’d take my calls on the first ring. Me. Not even 27 years old and people with bylines in The Daily Beast and The New Yorker knew my name. I was kind of a big shot. But one of them ratted me out for bringing them the story of the century. The millennium. Probably all of them did.

So yeah, I’m dead. It scares the hell out of me, but—

You know what? Forget it. I don’t know if you’re happy I’m dead or what. Maybe you are. I broke your heart, after all. I regret that. Not ending the engagement. Just hurting you. You didn’t deserve that. But I saw your wedding pictures on Instagram like two years after we split up, so I guess you weren’t too, well, broken up about it. She’s pretty. You two look happy.

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I guess if you hadn’t broken things off with me for taking care of our little…indiscretion, I’d’ve split up with you. It makes sense now, but back then I just felt hurt. With a degree in Women’s Studies from Vassar, pretty much the only option I had after graduation was VP of HR at a Nestle subsidiary while you saved the world one hedge fund at a time. But not long after you proposed, my senior adviser introduced me to some friends of hers, who introduced me to some friends of theirs, and, well, I could either follow your plan for us, or my plan for me.

So I went with me. The abortion and your throwing me out of your life over it was just the icing on the cake. But it launched me into my new career.

I started as an intern. Paying my dues. It sucked because I had to keep asking my parents for money to afford rent and food, but I learned a lot that first year. At Planned Parenthood you can’t claim that sexism in the workplace is keeping you from earning a living wage. I think they were monitoring me. Seeing how committed I was, how hard I’d work. After burning my bridges with you I had nothing else to do, so I threw myself into it.

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Stay tuned for more information on Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice!

That’s right, shoppers: Obsidian Point is putting together the second volume in the Appalling Stories series, and you can be a part of it!

Do you have a story, or at least the idea of a story that you don’t think the Social Justice Warrior-led publishing industry would want to touch with a ten-foot pole? Do your eyes roll into the back of your skull at the mention of terms like “representation,” “white privilege,” “cultural appropriation,” and “microaggression”? Do you have a ripped-from-the-headlines piece of short fiction that’s just aching to be told?

Now’s your chance to be part of something amazing. Write a non-PC tale for Appalling Stories 2!